Activ Ups Enterprise Sales Focus

Low-latency data provider Activ Financial will “aggressively recruit” sales staff worldwide over the course of 2012 to focus on enterprise sales as it builds out its product portfolio to meet the enterprise data requirements of financial clients.

Initially, Activ focused on selling data primarily to low-latency options trading groups, but has been expanding this client base to desks trading other asset classes as it has continued to grow its content globally and has incorporated fixed income and foreign exchange data, while increasing its enterprise value proposition by continuing to upgrade its technology platform for normalizing and distributing data within firms and its ActivNet global data distribution infrastructure, says Todd Albright, senior vice president and head of sales and marketing at Activ, who joined the vendor in March to lead the initiative.

“By building out our content portfolio and productizing our enterprise technology platform, along with ActivNet, we’re now able to have these enterprise-level conversations,” Albright says.

Activ will both approach existing global bank customers—to grow the vendor’s footprint within organizations already leveraging its content—and prospective clients with which the vendor can now initiate a relationship at several different levels across their enterprises, Albright says.

In particular, as firms face continued budget pressures, and the costs associated with a market data infrastructure remain closely scrutinized, many are looking to rationalize the number of data suppliers they use, and Activ’s ability to provide multiple solutions puts the vendor in a position to meet a broader range of requirements, Albright says. In addition, as banks look to achieve more efficiency in general by consolidating their datacenter footprints or leveraging cloud computing models, Activ’s ability to provide a fully managed, end-to-end market data solution will appeal to firms that may not have the resources to manage the infrastructure in-house, he adds.

To meet this demand, the vendor is now recruiting additional sales staff with experience of selling to global financial institutions, Albright says, and will “substantially increase” its headcount globally—though he declines to specify exactly how many new staff the vendor aims to hire.